Finally had the time this weekend to finish my mission to setup a fully featured mail server. For that I have to thank the nameless author of this blog.

My setup only differed slightly from his in that I created a new virtual machine on my linux server rather than any cloud based solution. I also created appropriate cname records for my dns for smtp and pop3 that both point to mail.warbel.net. I’m so far very happy with the setup – it’s robust, scalable and quite easy use once established. It’s not as fully featured (yet!) as an Exchange or Office365 system. I’ve already noticed that I cannot create out of office alerts or rules to handle incoming mail. I’m sure that will be my next project.

Final touches to the setup involved creating a forward lookup zone for warbel.net on my local DNS server. Due to the nature of port forwarding and having a single IP address etc etc., mobile devices fail to connect to the mail server when on the network. As such mai/pop3/smtp.warbel.net all point to the internal ip address of the mail server. Same applies to the web server and it’s related websites.

Buoyed by my success I’ve also created a new website – you’re looking at it.

Finally: I also reestablished routing between my home network and my parent’s site. They are connected by a PPTP VPN with routing handled by BGP (quagga). Again, over-kill here as it could easily be handled by static routes, but where is the fun in that? Kudos to the developers of OpenWRT for their fantastic work in enabling my network.